Wickedly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

  Ella.

  He hit pause on the interview with Mellie, then slept that computer screen. He would need all of his abilities to talk with his ex-wife.

  She didn’t look out of place in this part of the Greater World, even though he had never seen her in the Greater World before.

  She had once professed a hatred of it.

  Apparently that went away.

  She was too thin, much too thin, like so many rich, middle-aged women in Hollywood. She was almost skeletal. She wore black Capri pants, black flats with no socks, and a black mesh top over a rose-colored T-shirt. Her blond hair was pulled back away from her face, which seemed as skeletal as the rest of her, or maybe more skeletal. And shiny, the way that a person’s face got when they’d had too much plastic surgery.

  She hadn’t had any—he could see some frown lines near her still-beautiful blue eyes—but she was wearing too much make-up, which was probably why her skin had that shiny look.

  “Ella,” he said, trying to keep his tone neutral. But all he succeeded in doing was sounding flat. His heart was pounding. What was she doing here, in the Greater World? Why hadn’t she contacted him? Had she already tried to see the girls?

  “So this is your castle,” she said as she walked to the front desk. “How… pedestrian of you.”

  He smiled reflexively, not willing to let her know how much her very presence had upset him. “To what do I owe this pleasure? It can’t be because you want a book.”

  The dig slipped out before he could stop it, but she didn’t even seem to notice.

  “I do want a book,” she said. “And I even decided to buy it from you.”

  She paused while he took in that information. Ella wanted a book? Something really had shifted.

  “I figured I’d get the book here because I did want to see what’s been taking all of your time,” Ella said. “The girls told me this is your pride and joy.”

  He jolted at the mention of the girls, until he remembered that they called her every Sunday, whether she wanted them to or not.

  “They like it here too,” he said.

  “They’ve told me.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re turning them into creatures I don’t even recognize.”

  He didn’t say good, although he wanted to.

  “Your father certainly wouldn’t approve,” she added.

  “And that would be unusual how?” he asked.

  She smiled. Her smile was still lovely, giving an echo of the beauty she had once been. He realized suddenly, with great surprise, that Ella was younger than Mellie and looked much older. He wasn’t quite sure what had caused that—except that his ex-wife was clearly an unhappy woman.

  “Your father does care about what you do,” she said.

  “I know,” Charming said dryly. “He’s terrified I’ll continue to embarrass him.”

  Ella walked up to the desk, and rested her arms on it. They were sun-browned, and too-thin. She held some parchment in her right hand.

  “What are you doing here, really, Ella?” he asked.

  She slid the parchment at him, but kept one hand over it, so that he couldn’t read it. “Tell me, Charming,” she said in her softest voice. “Are the rumors true? Are you dating one of the stepmothers?”

  He could answer that honestly. “I’m not dating anyone.”

  “Yet the girls say you’ve been seeing a lot of—what’s her name? Mellie? Snow’s stepmother.”

  “We’re friends,” he said, wishing he could tell the girls not to talk about his personal life. But he didn’t want to get between them and their mother. The phone calls were all they had now. “Why?”

  Ella shrugged. “Just curious. I’d been hearing the strangest rumors.”

  “From the girls?” he asked.

  Ella didn’t answer directly, which was another of her maddening habits. “She’s written a book, hasn’t she? This stepmother of yours.”

  “She’s not my stepmother,” he said, disliking the implication. Ella made it sound like Mellie was older than he was. She wasn’t.

  “There’s a copy of Mellie’s book right near the desk,” Charming said. “You can buy it if you like.”

  “You’re not going to comp me a copy?” she asked.

  “Ella, you aren’t going to read it. We both know that.”

  “It’s a gift,” she said. “For a friend.”

  He almost said, You have friends? but thought the better of that too. “Just put it on the desk and I’ll ring it up. You want anything else?”

  “From here? Are you kidding?” Ella asked. “I don’t see why anyone would waste their time or their money in this place.”

  The words were designed to make him angry, and they worked. But he wasn’t going to let that anger out. He told her the price of the book, and she paid him with cash, which surprised him.

  Then she took her hand off the parchment. “I want you to sign this.”

  His breath caught. Now what was she trying to do? Steal the girls back? They had just calmed down and settled in. He wasn’t about to give this woman his daughters again.

  He took the document. It was one page, handwritten in the lovely calligraphic style of the courts in his Kingdom, and as he read, his heart sank.

  “You’re giving up all rights to the girls?” he asked, looking at her. It would break their hearts. “Why?”

  But he knew why. There had to be a man involved. A man and money and prestige.

  “You’re doing such a fine job with them,” Ella said. “You’re a much better parent than I could ever be.”

  “But you’re disowning them, Ella,” he said. “That’s just wrong. That’ll destroy them.”

  She frowned at him. “It will not. Children are resilient. Tell them what you want. It really doesn’t matter to me.”

  “All you’re doing is talking to them on the phone once a week,” he said. “That can hardly be a strain.”

  “It promotes a tie that we don’t have,” she said. “I think it’s better to have a clean break, don’t you?”

  “No,” he said. His heart ached. How did he fall for this woman? She was everything the fairy tale said she wasn’t—self-involved, self-centered, self-important. And she couldn’t feel love. That had surprised him when he married her, although the court wisewoman had an explanation.

  A child raised without love, she said, often cannot learn how to give it.

  “They’re your daughters,” Charming said. And then his trump card: “They love you.”

  Ella nodded. “I know,” she said, as if love were an expected thing, even after the way she had treated them. “But this is better.”

  “For whom, Ella?” he asked.

  “For all of us,” she said.

  He shoved the parchment back to her. “I’m not signing this thing.”

  “You don’t want them to be yours one hundred percent?” she asked.

  “They are mine one hundred percent,” he said. “I have sole custody. You have the right to talk to them once a week. That’s good enough.”

  “I don’t want to be tied down,” she said, her voice rising in a whine. “Don’t you understand?”

  “And a single call to the phone you carry with you is tied down?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Who is he?” he asked.

  “Who is who?” she asked.

  “It’s a man, right?” he asked. “You’re giving up your daughters for a man.”

  “No,” she said in that tone she used when she was lying. “I am not giving up my daughters at anyone’s request except yours.”

  “I never asked you to give them up,” Charming said. “I just wanted to raise them.”

  Then he looked at the document again, and read it very carefully. She wasn’t disowning the girls. She was annulling them. It negated not just Ella’s custodial rights and her parental rights, but the motherhood itself. As if it had never happened.

  He felt chilled. Kingdom court documents could be very da
ngerous. They actually had a bit of magic. If he signed this, there was a good possibility his daughters would cease to exist, because Ella would no longer be a mother.

  He took the document back. He wanted to tear it up, but he couldn’t even do that, not without taking a large risk. He had to consult someone magical, someone who knew what kind of magic this document held.

  “What happens if I don’t sign this?” he asked.

  “You have to,” she said and sounded a bit desperate.

  “Or…?”

  She shook her head.

  He ran a finger along the document, then touched the edges of the letters. Secondary writing appeared—the spell itself—and an expiration date. If the magic was not used within twenty-four hours of the creation of the document, the words would vanish.

  He gave her a measured look.

  “I’ll read this over, let my lawyer look at it, and talk to you about it next week,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Now.”

  “I don’t make any decisions about our girls rashly,” he said. “I’ll call you when I’ve made my decision.”

  “I’m leaving the Greater World in an hour,” she said. “I’ll need it then.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then give it back.” She reached for it.

  “No,” he said.

  She stamped her small foot. His daughters hadn’t done that since they were little, but his ex-wife seemed to do it all the time.

  “You’re going to ruin everything,” she snapped.

  “I just want time to consider this,” he said in his most reasonable tone.

  “You know that it won’t work if you wait. You know it. I want you to sign it now.”

  “And I want you to be a better person,” he said softly. “Neither of us will ever get what we want.”

  “I hate you, you know that?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. Those words no longer had the power to hurt him. “I do know that.”

  “I’m not calling those girls ever again,” she said. “I am disowning them, with or without that document.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “You’re a cold-hearted bastard,” she said.

  “I’m not the one abandoning my children,” he said.

  She glared at him. Then she started to stomp out of the store.

  “You forgot your book,” he said as a parting shot.

  To his surprise, she stomped back in and grabbed it. “It’s not my book,” she said as if that made it better.

  And then she did stomp out.

  He watched her shadow make its way across the store’s carpet, until she rounded the corner and disappeared.

  His heart was pounding. He put his head in his hands for just a brief moment. His wife had just tried to wish his girls out of existence. He would need to contact his attorney, and Lavinia, and anyone else he could think of.

  Ella had just gotten dangerous. Or even more dangerous. She had clearly gone off some kind of deep end.

  And it wasn’t his to wonder why (although he did). It was now his duty to protect his daughters.

  Somehow.

  Chapter 28

  Mellie would have told anyone who asked that the entire tour experience blurred into one long mess, filled with signings and interviews and impersonal hotel rooms. But she would’ve been lying. Because she thrived on this—the lack of sleep, the horrible food, the hurry-hurry-hurry to the next stop, the next town, the next airport.

  The only thing that bothered Mellie was Charming. She missed him. She missed seeing him, consulting with him. She even missed wishing she could flirt with him.

  When this tour was over, she’d get off the plane, run to his beautiful bookstore, wrap her arms around him, and give him the biggest, best kiss of her life. She would literally throw herself at him, and if he balked, she would step back and say it was all a thank-you for saving her.

  Because that was what he had done.

  The wonderful man.

  Mellie was hearing daily how the numbers on the books were trending upwards. After her Minneapolis appearances, the book started selling well in the Midwest. After she did some syndicated radio interviews, people showed up early at the stores to make sure they got copies of the books.

  And by the time she reached Philadelphia, the stores had sold out of their copies of Evil before she arrived. The people who showed up at the signing had bought the book a few days before.

  Things started to go sideways in Philadelphia, though. Until that point, she thought she could predict the questions in the interview:

  1. What caused you to write the book?

  2. Did the idea come out of your own life?

  3. Do you really believe stepmothers are misunderstood?

  4. What made you choose fairy tales as your vehicle of self-expression?

  5. What was it about the Snow White story that spoke to you?

  Those questions usually comprised the entire interview, and after the third day of the tour, she could answer them by rote.

  She tried not to, though, because then the interviews would start to sound canned, and what people liked—according to LaTisha the publicist who, in addition to traveling with Mellie, monitored blogs, and reactions to the signings—was Mellie’s passion for her topic.

  Her readers surprised her too—or her potential readers, anyway, at the first part of her tour. The people who bought the book weren’t all stepmothers. Some were stepchildren who loved their stepmothers (“My mom abandoned me,” she heard more than once, “but my stepmom was there, and she raised me. She’s my real mom.”). Others were husbands who had second wives (“Finally, someone who has told the world what we’re going through.”). And the most surprising group—at least to her—stepfathers (“I know women get the bad rap in fairy tales,” they’d said, “but all stepparents get a bad rap in real life.”).

  By the time Mellie reached D.C. half of the people who came to the signing had already read the book, and wanted to engage her on its contents. Most of the comments were positive, although a few—mostly from young girls—complained about the portrayal of Snow White as selfish.

  Mellie wished she could answer that truthfully. It was the only part of the book she didn’t like. Yes, Snow had been self-involved, but she had also been eighteen years old. She hadn’t really understood all the things she was feeling. If the blood weren’t so bad between them (Mellie would say), she would be able to tell Snow her side of the story, and Snow would finally understand.

  But Mellie hadn’t told Snow her side of the story. She couldn’t change that.

  But it looked like she might be able to change the perception of it.

  Until that last round of interviews in Philadelphia. Mellie hadn’t realized it at the time, but a day later—after things changed in Boston—she thought back, and saw the seeds in Philadelphia.

  She had been in a television studio in Philadelphia at W-something-something-something. She had just come from a marvelous hour-long radio interview at WHYY with Terry Gross of Fresh Air, discussing books and women’s issues. LaTisha thought that was Mellie’s best interview yet, and she did as well. It would air later in the week, and it would, Mellie thought, bring a whole new class of reader to the book.

  Now, television studios, like hotel rooms, tended to look alike. Lots of cables, lots of teleprompters, lots of segmented areas with “permanent” sets that looked like they’d been designed fifteen years before.

  Mellie got to sit in front of a desk, as if she were an anchor, while someone pinned a mike to her lapel. She was told to answer questions “naturally,” and she had to watch the screen in front of her, for the different interviewers, from different stations across the Northeast, who were going to ask her a few questions and then use them in their noon (or morning) “entertainment” segments.

  She wasn’t sure where the first question came from—Delaware? Vermont? Connecticut?—but it was one of the few she had never heard before: “Tell me about your writing
day.”

  Fortunately, LaTisha had prepared Mellie for that. Sometimes, LaTisha said, someone who really loves reading asks what your writing day is like, expecting it to be glamorous. The key is to answer the question politely without being insulting.

  Mellie gave the answer she’d been trained to give, how in the confines of her own home, she could go on adventures without ever changing out of her pajamas.

  She got the question twice more in that round of interviews, and even LaTisha had commented on it, saying how rare it was to get that question more than once a tour.

  But Mellie didn’t mind. Nor did she think much about it when the host of one of Philadelphia’s morning shows—a man who, all things considered, would rather not be in Philadelphia—commented that she looked too glamorous to be a writer.

  “And not an ounce of fat,” said the weather guy, who (LaTisha told her later) had been hired as comic relief.

  “How do you stay so thin when you spend all your time reading and writing?” the host asked as if her slender form was some kind of conspiracy.

  “I believe in exercise,” Mellie said truthfully. “It’s the one thing I miss when I’m on tour like this.”

  She had effectively changed the subject, and then she deftly brought it back to parenthood (“Of course,” she said, “I’ve been through that before. As the mother of young children, I didn’t get much exercise either.”) and LaTisha had complimented her on her smoothness.

  Those incidents seemed like comfortable (and much needed) blips in an otherwise routine group of questions.

  And then she was in Boston, Boston with its major media, Boston with its famously aggressive press corps, Boston which had its own mini-publishing industry (some of whose members had bid upon and lost the opportunity to publish Evil).

  On the cab ride in from Logan International Airport, LaTisha (who had been hugging her BlackBerry as if it were an old boyfriend) told Mellie that the publicity department had heard from Oprah’s people.

  “A tentative gesture,” LaTisha said. “They want to know how the sales are going, what kind of person you are, and if you’re going to be all interviewed out before Oprah even gets to you. I told them that you have hidden depths, and that they might want to consider a topical interview instead of one focused on the book.”